Episode #440 Building Trust After Broken Promises, With Josie Williams
- Laura Hollabaugh
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
On This Episode Of The Public Health Epidemiology Conversations (PHEC) Podcast
What happens when you lose your father, your job, and your housing within 30 days, only to be told you're $5 over the income limit for help? For Josie Williams, that devastating moment became the foundation for her life's work transforming the very systems that once failed her.
From Survival to Strategy
Josie William's journey through homelessness as a single mother revealed a harsh truth about public health systems: they often aren't designed for the realities of the people they're meant to serve. Working multiple temporary agency jobs, she discovered agencies were deliberately keeping her from permanent positions to exploit her labor. Shelters closed before her work schedule allowed. The system told her to sell her car (her only home and transportation) to qualify for assistance. These weren't just personal hardships. They were structural barriers that thousands of families navigate invisibly every day.
Today, Josie is the Founder and CEO of Envision Consultant Group and a Senior Research Associate at Georgia Health Policy Center. She helps nonprofits, health systems, local governments, and philanthropic organizations move from good intentions to equitable action. Her specialty is community engagement strategy informed by both lived experience and a decade of professional facilitation work nationwide.
The Real Work of Health Equity
In this conversation with Dr. Huntley, Josie shares what it actually takes to rebuild trust in communities that have experienced broken promises. She explains why she spent six months simply listening before asking a community for anything. She reveals how understanding conditioning and trauma informs every facilitation she leads. She challenges organizations to build their own capacity and readiness before rushing into community engagement.
The conversation addresses a critical gap in public health practice: the disconnect between grant timelines and the actual work of systemic change. Josie explains why two-year funding cycles often fail to account for the essential labor of trust-building and relationship repair that must happen before sustainable solutions can emerge.
When Good Intentions Aren't Enough
Josie offers a perspective that many well-meaning organizations need to hear. She shares examples of grants that looked perfect on paper but lacked genuine community relationships in practice. She describes walking into environments with deep skepticism and fatigue, where previous researchers extracted data without sharing results, where promises were made and not kept.
Her approach centers what she calls "Voice to Vision to Action," ensuring community voices don't just get heard but actually get implemented. This means creating structures where residents don't just have seats at tables. They help create the tables. It means recognizing that people closest to problems are those closest to solutions.
The Power of Personal Experience
Perhaps most importantly, Josie opens up about why she's only now beginning to share her personal story publicly in 2025. She explains how it took over a decade to recover from her homelessness experience, not just financially but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. She shares why she now views her lived experience as a superpower and invites others to recognize their own stories as essential expertise.
This conversation will resonate with anyone who has navigated systems that weren't designed for them, anyone working to make health equity real rather than theoretical, and anyone who believes that sustainable change requires both institutional resources and community wisdom.
About Our Guest
Josie Williams
Josie Williams is a nationally recognized community strategist, facilitator, and speaker who brings both lived experience and professional expertise to the work of health equity, housing, and systems change. As Founder and CEO of Envision Consultant Group and Senior Research Associate at Georgia Health Policy Center, Josie has led multi-sector collaboratives, environmental justice initiatives, and community-led responses to the affordable housing crisis.
Her leadership has received both national and statewide recognition, including the National Grassroots Policy and Community Engagement Award and the Stella J. Adams Fair Housing Advocate Award. She has published in the North Carolina Medical Journal, co-produced a documentary focused on centering community voice, and presented her work at the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, as well as at Meharry College School of Global Health.
Josie's journey from surviving homelessness to leading cross-sector movements gives her a perspective that is both deeply grounded and strategically sharp. She formerly served as Executive Director of the Greensboro Housing Coalition, where she saw firsthand how mold, poor housing quality, disinvestment, and environmental hazards show up as poor health conditions like asthma, anxiety, and chronic stress across entire neighborhoods. She is known for creating brave, practical learning spaces where community members, nonprofits, public agencies, philanthropy, and health systems can move from insight to action.
Listen To This Episode Of The Public Health Epidemiology Conversations (PHEC) Podcast
Conversation Highlights
Lived experience is expertise, not just inspiration.
Josie's personal navigation of homelessness, system barriers, and exploitation informs every strategy she develops. Organizations that recognize lived experience as a credential alongside professional training create more effective, equitable solutions.
Communities aren't resistant to change.
They're resistant to being ignored. When partnerships fail, it's rarely because communities don't want improvement. It's because systems haven't built genuine relationships, haven't listened deeply, or haven't followed through on commitments.
Build organizational capacity before engaging community.
Many organizations rush into community engagement without first ensuring their own internal readiness. Josie emphasizes that sustainable partnerships require institutions to do their own preparation work, including understanding history, examining their own systems, and creating responsive structures.
Trust-building takes time that grant cycles often don't account for.
Josie spent six months listening and building relationships in one community before making any asks. This essential labor of repair and relationship development is frequently missing from funding timelines, yet it's critical for sustainable change.
Create structures where communities help build the table, not just sit at it.
True equity in community engagement means moving beyond token participation to co-creation. Residents should have decision-making power in designing processes, not just input opportunities in predetermined structures.
Language matters, but meeting basic needs matters more.
While public health professionals focus on precise terminology like avoiding "empowerment," community members are navigating survival. Organizations should be mindful that communities are catching up to new language while addressing urgent, practical needs.
Sustainable solutions require both institutional resources and community wisdom.
Neither sector alone can create lasting change. Josie's approach bridges community knowledge with organizational capacity, ensuring solutions are both grounded in reality and supported by infrastructure to sustain them.
"People aren't resistant to change. They're resistant to being ignored." - Josie Williams
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Public Health Consulting To Support You
DrCHHuntley LLC is a public health consulting firm that specializes in epidemiology consulting, supporting large nonprofit organizations in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Florida that serve Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). We also provide nationwide public health consulting and epidemiology consulting support to BIPOC organizations across the United States.